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After recently delivering a 15-way
open-source Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPU comparison, here are the benchmarks when
tossing in the proprietary AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA graphics drivers too. Besides
comparing a diverse selection of graphics processors from the three main desktop
GPU vendors, this comparison also shows how the current open-source Linux graphics
drivers compare to the official proprietary drivers.

The graphics processors being compared in this article include the Intel HD
Graphics 4600 (Haswell from a Core i7 4770K CPU) and then on the AMD side is the
Radeon HD 5830, HD 6450, HD 6770, HD 6870, HD 6950, HD 7850, and HD 7950. On the
NVIDIA GeForce product selection was the 9500GT, 9800GT, GTX 460, GTX 550 Ti,
and GTX 680. The slimmer GeForce card selection comes down to traditionally AMD
sending over more hardware samples to Phoronix than NVIDIA and that on the open-source
driver side many NVIDIA GPUs are still problematic with Nouveau. The graphics
card selection overall for this open vs. closed driver testing is slimmed down
than the earlier 15-way open-source comparison since the older Radeon graphics
cards no longer supported by the mainline Catalyst graphics driver were removed.

All testing happened from Fedora 19 on the Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell"
system. Aside from the stock Fedora 19 setup, the AMD Catalyst driver tested was
the 13.6 Beta (OpenGL 4.2.12337 / fglrx 13.10.10) and the NVIDIA 319.32 binary
driver for the GeForce GPUs. Intel has no proprietary Linux driver to test but
all of their efforts are focused around their open-source Linux graphics driver.

All of this Linux OpenGL benchmarking was handled via the open-source Phoronix
Test Suite software. The selection of Linux OpenGL games were limited to those
that run well on Mesa across Radeon Gallium3D, Nouveau Gallium3D, and the Intel
Mesa DRI driver -- of course, the games also run fine on AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA's
binary driver too.

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